Tools to Prune Decision Trees

When authoring interactive decision trees, your trees usually start small, and then slowly grow to be more complex. At a certain point – we recommend 50 nodes – it’s best to split your overall design into separate subtrees, and link them together with Tree Nodes. Managing several trees of 50 nodes or less is often a lot easier than dealing with one big tree. And to make this easier, Zingtree has a tool to “prune” your trees.

There are three types of Prune operations:

• Copy, Link and Delete: Delete the pruned section, copy it to a new tree, and add a Tree Node that links to the new tree.
• Copy pruned section to a new tree
• Delete a pruned section from the tree

Example

Here’s the designer view of one of our more complex support trees from the Zingtree Demo Gallery. To simplify the overall design, we will prune the highlighted portion:

If we choose to Copy, Link and Delete, the subtree is removed, a new tree is created, and a tree node is created that links to the new tree:

How to Prune using Designer

1. Click on the top node of the subtree to prune.
2. Click the red Prune button.
3. When the Prune tool appears, choose one of the three options: Copy, Link and Delete / Copy / Delete.

Pruning from Overview

You can also quickly prune from the Overview tool. Just click the Prune tool next to the node at the top of the subtree you want to prune.

The same three choices ofCopy, Link and Delete / Copy / Delete are shown.

Summary

The Prune tool was one of our most requested new features, and also one of the more technically difficult ones to implement. If you like this feature or have suggestions to improve it, please let us know!